Comment by Arrowmaster

The author makes a very common mistake of not reading the very first line of the documentation for .gitignore.

  A gitignore file specifies intentionally untracked files that Git should ignore. Files already tracked by Git are not affected; see the NOTES below for details.

You should never be putting "!.gitignore" in .gitignore. Just do `echo "*" > .gitignore; git add -f .gitignore`. Once a file is tracked any changes to it will be tracked without needing to use --force with git add.